so, as i was saying in my last post, i was chilling with lisa and virginia at the point and the topic of flickr came up. lisa mentioned that she wished there was an easier way to save her photos in iphoto, edit them in photoshop, and upload them to flickr without having to export the photos to her desktop over and over. i said, WHAT? why would you do such a thing? then i thought, wow, i must have the secret touch when it comes to streamlining. i'm always looking for the easiest approach to a problem whereas some people may look for any kind of answer at all and continue to do it even though it's not easy.
well, here's a quick tutorial on how to make getting your photos into flickr easy peasy. i'm including steps if you have iphoto, though, i'm sure there's some software on a PC that will do it as well. i wouldn't know. skip down to step 8 if you want to just blog your images once they are in flickr. (full tutorial in the extended entry)
well, i'm all switched over to using flickr as my primary image source. thanks everyone for the encouragement! i mentioned it at spiders on friday (yes, i actually made it into the city for a fun night on the town!) and had the most baffling conversation with lisa and virginia about how they upload pictures for their blogs. it's convoluted to say the least! so i'm going to write up a quick tutorial this week on how to streamline the process if you use a mac.
i do have an FO to show! i love it. i think that i even managed to make the right size for my head despite my laziness to make the bigger version.
gretel complete!
all the stats are on ravelry, of course. i decided to make the "regular" size and not the slouchy size after i decided that i really don't like cables. first koolhaas and now this, really, i'm done with cables for a while. they are pretty but so darn tedious!
from the top
now, about this DB pure cashmere. i didn't think that it was any softer than the cashmerino. it's nice, yes, but not as nice at the cashmere that jess and lisa got at rhinebeck two years ago. the plies of DB pure cashmere were perfect for a cabley project though. they really make those cables POP!
showing off the handknits
the peanut and i got a chance to go out and show off our handknits yesterday. it wasn't particularly warm but it was sunny!
ok, now for a little video i've been holding on to (no, it's not a peanut video. i still have to upload those!) saw this a few weeks ago and couldn't stop laughing. i love improv everywhere! (click through from RSS feed for video).
my apologies. the peanut is going through another growth spurt, i think. i swear that she looks bigger today than she did yesterday! she's been sleeping really crappy lately. a lot of late night screaming. yesterday, i was so bleary eyed and exhausted that i literally passed out when she took her nap. people, i do not nap. at least, i don't do it well. 9 times out of 10 i lay down to nap and my mind is buzzing and i can't fall asleep. so yeah, i'm pretty tired. last night she awoke again around 1:45AM and i had to go in and flip her on her back and go back to bed while listening to her cry. she was ok, just a little freaked out. if i had stayed with her, she would have cried for longer. yikes, i'm tired!
in my tiredness haze, i'm thinking about abandoning my gleek.net gallery. good or bad idea? i'll leave it there but i'm thinking about using flickr now as my primary place for images. i figure that if flickr ever gets bought out and defunct, i can always go back to my gallery because i keep everything saved on my hard drive. thoughts? i really want to use the flickr community more and uploading to two destinations is getting tiresome.
so anyway, speaking of flickr, i uploaded some pics of the spiders annual eat, knit, and be merry party at marie's that we had last weekend. we did a one sock swap and i gave my nutkin to its recipient, katie.
katie shows off my nutkin i made for her
i also made that cute bag too but didn't get a pic of it. you can see it on katie's site. i LOVED knitting the nutkin. it's cabling without cables. brilliant no? here's another pic of it.
love that toe
i did a short row toe for the first time. it was very easy and wow, i love how this one is finished. a little 3-needle bind-off right where the toe meets the foot of the sock. cute cute.
we are some serious knitters
i love how everyone in this picture is knitting. believe it or not, this party was a blast as are all of the spiders parties!
mmmm, so happy
here is the lovely sock that nancy made for me!! (ravelry) I LOVE IT SO! i can't wait to cast on for the second one... and i think that everyone is just as happy with theirs!
hahaha, couldn't resist
couldn't resist a group shot! anyway, it was a successful swap and party. full set on flickr.
i've got some videos to show you and other things to talk about but it'll have to wait till next time!
when you have a baby, all you can think about sometimes is milestones. when will she smile? when will she eat solid food happily? crawl? walk? be potty-trained? with those milestones comes disruption, though, as we're finding out here at casa gleek. little peanut is going to crawl.. soon. she's obsessively getting on her stomach and thrusting her hips into the air. she's so obsessive about it that it's stopping her from sleeping well, and quite frankly, stopping everyone within two blocks of sleeping well! with age, the crying gets louder, unfortunately. so i'm a little worn out and i think that this post will be heavy on the pictures.
here, here are some happy peanut pics.
what's this?
happiness!
she loves those flowers sooooo much (thanks kate!) KP does a little puppet show with them and they make her giggle.
stop moving!
the eating part of lunchtime may not bring on the smiles, but funny faces from mom do.
in the box, yes, she still loves the box
cheerios make her happy too. especially the big yellow box.
standing!
and something that makes me happy: baby butt and legs.
know what else makes me happy? new things on the needles!
love yarn in little cakes
yep, i got busy on saturday night, winding up some yarn. then i cast on for gretel (ravelry)! finally something for myself. let's hope that it stays relatively cool outside so that i can wear it when i'm done with it.
and i also cast on for KP's second sock. he's not allowed to talk or ask about it again till it's done.
them's the rules. so i'm wrapping up this post so that i can watch project runway!
p.s. nutkin is pretty much done too. i just have to bind off the toe but i'm not going to do that until saturday when i present it to my secret pal. i'm SO nervous it's not going to fit. i've never knit for someone who has smaller feet than myself. i have confidence, but i'm not taking a chance by binding it off and weaving in the ends. i want her to love it and wear it!
due to a lack of knitting (i'm chugging away on the sock and that's it) and the fact that i'm knee-deep in a new freelance project, i bring you... filler. some of you may find this interesting, others may not. if you have a blog of your own, though, i highly recommend reading through. i'll keep it short on words, high on graphics.
as of today, gleek.net's stats are as follows:
holding strong at 412 entries (this entry is 413) and over 3000 comments! i'm glad i'm taking the time to post more often now. it's good to be back in touch.. and it also seems that posting more often brings more traffic to my site. let's take a look at my visits stats (all of the following are from my mint installation):
as you can see, january gave me my largest spike in almost a year. i have a feeling that i have a lot of new readers! i love how the day breaks down on the left.. 10PM ET seems to be a popular time to surf my site.
looks like the patterns page and the index get the most traffic around here. i wish i was a little more diligent about putting links into del.icio.us. my ravelry queue has taken over there. still, i think that my vino arm warmers bring in a lot of traffic (see below). after that, i'm glad to see the peanut is well-loved! and so is the gallery.
i was surprised to see how many people searched for "arm warmers" and ended up on my site. possibly as surprised as seeing people search for "oreo pizza" and "care bears". mint is great. really, i'm still awed by it every time i come to look at my stats. the little image icon next to some of the searches like "gable" means that the person did an image search (either on google images or a similar image search engine) and ended up on my site.
now let's talk about browsers because i'm sure that's what most people want to know about. IE still seems to dominate the scene i'm sad to report. please switch to firefox! i'm happy to see firefox's numbers so high. they weren't like this a year ago. i recently read about record numbers of FF users in europe so that might have something to do with it. seriously, folks, IE is not secure. it's riddled with bugs and will certainly force you to reinstall windows a hundred times because it's been hacked without you knowing it. firefox is the bomb! just today i installed a great add-on called greasemonkey that allows me to add enhancements to flickr. so cool!
no real surprise here. windows is still leading but mac is catching up! who's been accessing my site with a wii? i would love to see what it looks like! we access gleek.net at home with our playstation 3 every now and again. i'm happy to say it works like a charm.
this one blew me away. i had no idea that google reader had such a following! i knew that bloglines was top but i always thought that newsgator would come in second. guess not.
speaking of RSS readers, here's a quick look at my feed subscribers. looks like i'm averaging around 145 daily scribs per week. nice.
this panel is a little hard to read (i wish there was a better way of showing this information) but it looks like most people view gleek.net at a window width of over 900 pixels. there seem to be a lot more people out there with smaller monitors than i would have hoped for. i guess i shouldn't make my site wider, eh?
and last but not least, my favorite panel, locations. check out india! turkey! korea! holy moses. my favorite: lithuania. did you know that my husband is part lithuanian? it's where our last name comes from.
anyway, i hope you all find this interesting and useful! i hope to do it every year and take a look at trends. chime in if you have something to add or, dude, if you're reading from india! turkey! or korea! say hi :)
i could use some advice from the mamas in my audience. i'm thinking about switching to cloth diapers and am wondering what's involved in making the switch. i think that this would be a good time to switch. without getting into the gory details, the peanut is pretty regular and not so messy. when she was small and just drinking breastmilk, that was a different story and would have been pretty gross all around. now i feel like we're putting too much waste into the landfills and we can cut back. i would probably still use a commercial overnite diaper at night but could go cloth during the day.
so what's involved? i have been watching glampyre make diapers for her baby. it seems labor intensive but look how colorful and fun! what would i need to get started? what's a typical laundry day like? do you do laundry everyday?
